In that first year of working for Mary, Charlie let himself imagine a different version of the story. One in which the documents were mere chicken feed, a way to establish his bona fides without giving anything away. A KGB officer tried to seduce me. I let her think I’d fallen for it. But the whole time, I was the one recruiting her. It wasn’t beyond the pale. If Charlie managed to turn Mary to their side? Then every betrayal would look like tactical brilliance. The months went by, the betrayals mounted, and he clung to this idea. Redemption. Lemons into lemonade.
Until a slow Tuesday in January 1988, when those lemons became unredeemably sour.
At the end of the workday, Hacker stood up and asked if he was coming. Charlie explained that he was picking Amanda up from a playdate, and it was right on the way home, so he was going to keep working until then. “Glamorous life of a spy, right?” he said, and Hacker laughed. As the station gradually emptied, Charlie remained at his desk, diligently typing up a contact report.
Last summer, a memo had circulated through CIA stations in Europe about the Stinger missiles that America was supplying to the insurgents in Afghanistan. The missiles were lightweight and highly portable: a mujahideen fighter could pick it up, prop it on his shoulder, point it at the sky, and take down a Soviet helicopter in one shot. Some people questioned the wisdom of arming the mujahideen with these weapons, but these voices were drowned out by those in Washington who were eager to seize the moment. The Soviets were in retreat, losing the war. These weapons would help bleed them dry. The memo took pains to demonstrate that every penny of Operation Cyclone was worth it.
Mary knew about this memo. She wanted a copy of it.
For security reasons, the station didn’t have a Xerox machine, but the embassy did. It was in a small room on the second floor, near where the ambassador’s secretary sat. Several months earlier, back in the summer, Charlie had stopped by the secretary’s desk and said sheepishly: “Glynda, do you think you can find it in your heart to help an old man get out of the doghouse?”
She peered over the edge of her glasses. “What do you think I do here all day?”
The thing was, he explained, his daughter was in a summer camp, and he was supposed to help her with an arts-and-crafts project—a collage of her family—and it was due tomorrow, and he’d promised to help with it, but he had completely forgotten about it until that morning. “I brought these in”—he was carrying their old photo albums from Algiers and Bern and Berlin—“and thought I could make copies of them. But I have no idea how to use that machine. Will you show me?”
Softened by sympathy, Glynda showed Charlie which buttons to press. For the next several minutes they stood there, watching the images of Charlie and Helen’s younger, smiling selves emerging from the machine.
Months had passed, and Charlie had become well-acquainted with that machine. Now, on that January evening, when the last person had left the station and he was finally alone, Charlie walked over to the station’s metal safe and entered the combination. He slipped the Stinger memo inside the photo album, which he’d kept at the office as a handy excuse. He carried the album under his arm and, humming nonchalantly, opened the door to the embassy proper. The rest of the building was deserted, too. As he stood at the Xerox machine, Charlie paused. The distant hum of a vacuum cleaner. Almost deserted, then. Well, that would have to be good enough.
An hour later, he stood in Mary’s apartment. She read the memo with what struck him as an unusual degree of attention. “This is very helpful,” she murmured. “Thank you. You’re getting to be quite good at this, Charlie.”
As he walked home, he told himself, as usual, that it hadn’t been a big deal. (Right?) After all, Washington couldn’t stop crowing about this weapon. When you thought about it, the information in the memo wasn’t that much more revealing than what you could read about in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Chicken feed. (Right?) Just chicken feed.
Then again, for chicken feed, Mary seemed awfully interested.
Her requests were becoming more specific, acquiring an edge that had previously been lacking. In March 1988, it was the schematics of the Stinger missile. In June, it was the location coordinates of an important tribal chieftain in the Panjshir Valley. In September, it was the names of the top officials in the Soviet-allied Afghan government who had taken cash payments from the Americans.
Her shopping list included other items, too: information related to the Star Wars program, or the Contras in Nicaragua, or the AIDS epidemic. Maybe the requests were legitimate, or maybe they were designed to throw him off the scent. But Afghanistan—Charlie felt increasingly certain of this—was the meat-and-potatoes of her work, her central preoccupation.
The timing might have seemed odd. Gorbachev had long planned the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, and by now the drawdown was almost halfway over. But wars like these neither began nor ended neatly. The KGB were in Afghanistan well before the first soldier arrived. They would remain in Afghanistan well after the final soldier departed. The world would soon stop paying attention, but Mary and the KGB would remain.
Charlie had to turn this around. But the problem was, the longer this went on, the bigger the payoff would have to be. The hole he’d dug himself was growing deep. By late 1988, he was dealing in much more than chicken feed. The information he was handing over to Mary and the KGB: allies might well die as a result. He had to find her weak point.
But what was it? He snooped through Mary’s apartment while she was in the bathroom—and found nothing incriminating. He parked himself in the café across the street from the telecom firm—but she diligently adhered to her cover, arriving at 8 a.m. and leaving at 6 p.m. Sometimes he followed her at night, but that was harder to swing, because he and Hacker often had surveillance shifts, and when he didn’t, he felt that he ought to at least put an appearance in on the home front.
Fall turned to winter. He was detaching from his own life. Charlie had the bizarre sense that he was watching himself in a movie. The little pine table in the kitchen, the sounds and smells of dinner cooking, the people he loved most in the world, his wife, his child: Didn’t this man know how good he had it? He wondered, sometimes, if it wasn’t too late to come clean. His cowardice was destroying everything he had.
Amanda, at least, was a blessed source of distraction. Perched on her booster seat, she told long, complicated stories about school. “I learned a song today!” she said. “It’s about a, about a, about a witch who puts the bad children in the ocean.” Often she wore her cowgirl costume, left over from Halloween, to the table. It was like she had been crafted in a laboratory for the very purpose of easing the tension between Helen and Charlie. After dinner the three of them would do the whole routine, bath time and pajamas and The Polar Express, which was the only book she ever wanted to read, despite Helen’s efforts otherwise.
But when they closed her door and the distraction ceased, the mood in the apartment changed. Charlie washing the dishes, Helen drying. Any more wine for you? No, thank you, I’m okay. Theirs was the heartbreaking politeness of strangers. How was your day? Oh, it was fine. The usual. How was yours? They would read for a little while in the living room, Helen absorbed in a novel, Charlie staring passively at his imported copy of Newsweek or Sports Illustrated.
He didn’t register the words. Mostly his mind drifted back in time, slipping into reveries. Their younger, smiling selves. Helen, standing beside Lake Geneva, squinting across the clear blue water and saying: “It’s almost too nice. Honestly. The Swiss are a bunch of show-offs.” Helen, walking through the whitewashed alleys of the Casbah in Algiers, pointing at a gray kitten in the doorway. “What do you think?” she whispered. “Should we take him home?”
And further back, to summers in the musty old Dennehey beach house, sand in the sheets, the smell of Coppertone. To nights in her narrow dorm room bed, Neil Young blasting down the hallway, batik-shaded lamps tinting their skin red. To the first time he brought her home to Greenwich, the eerie hush of the foyer, Helen shifting nervously in her wooden clogs. “Dennehey,” Mr. Cole said, shaking Helen’s hand. “Your people must be Irish.” His mother, at least, was a little more polite. They talked about what Helen was studying, and at one point during dinner, she turned to Charlie and said: “You’ve certainly found yourself a smart young woman.”
Later that night, Charlie said: “That wasn’t too bad, right? My mother clearly loves you.”
“Loves me?” Helen laughed. “I don’t think so.”
“She kept going on about how smart you are.”
“It wasn’t meant as a compliment.”
He frowned. “How could she not mean that as a compliment?”
“Charlie.” She brushed the hair from his forehead. “I think you’re wonderful, but I’m not sure you really understand how women work.”
Sitting at the kitchen table, he remembered Helen’s long-ago observation. He also remembered something Hacker recently said. “I have this theory,” he’d said. “Women are harder to recruit. They just don’t think like us. They’re more subtle, somehow. Is that sexist? If I mean it in a nice way?”
It occurred to him that he, Charlie, had never actually recruited a female agent. Not a single one, in all these years. He had tried, but none of the targets had worked out.
How had he never seen this pattern before? And why on earth did he imagine that he was going to suddenly break this streak of failure with Mary, of all people? She would never let him get a glimpse of her real self. Her insecurities, her hungers, her weaknesses.
She understood him. But he understood nothing about her in return.
He didn’t stand a chance.
This was the moment Charlie started giving up.
Helen didn’t know about the silent decision Charlie had made. But she, like everyone, could see the external manifestations of it: his hunched shoulders, his paunchy belly. He’d stopped running. He ate too much. Food was one of the few things that could distract him. That inner voice of shame only seemed to shut up when he was eating his third donut or tearing open another bag of potato chips. Or, strangely, when he was reading about the Yankees. They were having another disappointing season, but he found that he actually liked reading about a bunch of losers.
Helen was more patient than he deserved. It began to baffle him, her decision to stick with this depressing head case of a husband. He could sense the end coming, and yet he felt powerless to stop it.
It finally happened in May 1989, on a Saturday morning a few weeks after Amanda’s sixth birthday. Helen said to Amanda, “Go get your shoes on, sweetie. I’ll be right there.” Then she turned to Charlie, who was clearing the breakfast dishes, and said: “I’m dropping her off at Linna’s. You’ll be here when I get back?”
He knew exactly what Helen’s we-need-to-talk face looked like. On some level he’d been expecting this, but now that the moment was here, his heart thumped in panic. Fight-or-flight was kicking in. He had to do something! Could he run away? No. That was stupid. It was merely delaying the inevitable. So could he explain it to her? The whole situation, the whole enchilada? Beg for her understanding, her forgiveness? But this, too, was merely another form of delay. What did he expect? That the truth would be enough? That she would learn about the spying, and she would want to stay with him? Forget it.
The front door closed. He looked at the cereal bowl in his hand. He told himself: You can’t decide anything until you wash this bowl. So he picked up the sponge, scrubbed the bowl, rinsed it, placed it on the draining board. Then he reached for the next bowl in the sink. Then the coffee mugs. Then he wiped down the kitchen table. Then he picked up a towel and started drying the dishes. As he did, he grew calmer. It felt good to put things in order. By the time Helen returned, Charlie had brought out the vacuum, sliding it under the edge of the oven to catch the crumbs. She said, with a tone of slight surprise, “You’re vacuuming?”
Charlie shrugged. “I thought I might as well make myself useful.”
“Well. Okay. Let’s sit down.”
“Should I make more coffee?”
She shook her head. “Charlie, I’m going to talk for a while. I don’t want you to say anything. Okay? Just let me talk.”
He did as she asked and kept his mouth shut. It was strange. It was like one version of him was there in the room, listening to her explain, and another version was already looking back on this from some future point. The pain of loss was already twinned with the pain of remembering. “You never understood how lonely I was,” she was saying, and he knew he was never going to be allowed to forget this, not just her words, but the way she looked as their marriage ended. Her devastating dignity; her fierce refusal to cry.
Last weekend, she said, when she went to pick up Amanda from Linna’s, she spotted Charlie emerging from the apartment building, the same one he’d emerged from two years earlier. She had suspected for a while that things were beyond repair. “I’ll be honest,” she said. “Part of me was relieved to have caught you. Because now I know what I have to do.”
They were leaving the next day. Amanda was going to stay at Linna’s that night, and Helen would spend the rest of the day packing. When she was finished talking, she dropped her head into her hands. “God,” she said. For the first time, fury tinged her voice. “It’s such a fucking cliché. I hate being a cliché.”
Because she’d asked him to, Charlie remained quiet. But he also knew that staying quiet was an act of cruelty. Tell her the truth. Don’t let the lie persist. You’re not a cliché, Helen. What I’ve done is so much worse than that.
But she was right. He was a coward to the end.